from the the-mole-finally-got-whacked dept

We've long documented how there's a growing array of websites that seem intent on shooting themselves in the foot when it comes to "defeating" ad blocking. Quite often that includes punishing customers for a website's own misdeeds, or using ham-fisted (and frankly often broken) systems that attempt to block the ad blockers. Of course, this tends to obfuscate why these users are using blockers in the first place, whether it's to keep ads from eating their broadband usage allotments, or simply as an attempt to protect themselves from "ads" that are often indistinguishable from malware.

The bottom line is that thanks to aggressive, poorly designed or downright hostile ads, many consumers quite justly now feel that ad blockers are an essential part of their privacy and security. Here at Techdirt, we long ago decided to let our visitors decide what their ad experience looks like, letting visitors disable ads entirely if that's they're preference (we just, of course, hope they'll try to support us in other ways). Elsewhere though, websites are engaged in what feels like a futile game of Whac-a-Mole that seems increasingly obvious (to some) won't be "winnable."

New developments on the ad block front seem to indicate this game of Whac-a-Mole may soon end up with the mole being -- well -- most decidedly whacked.

Princeton and Stanford researchers say they've developed a new method of blocking advertisements that detects ads the same way human beings do -- by simply looking at things like container sizes, graphical layout, and words like "Sponsored" (usually mandated by regulations or voluntary, cross-industry commitments). Computer scientist Arvind Narayanan and his colleagues have published a new paper (pdf) and proof-of-concept code for something they're calling a Perceptual Ad Blocker. Their paper describes the new technology as such:

"Perceptual ad blocking seeks to improve resilience against ad obfuscation and minimize manual effort needed to create ad blockers. We rely on the key insight that ads are legally required to be clearly recognizable by humans. To make the method robust, we deliberately
ignore all signals invisible to humans, including URLs and markup. Instead we consider visual and behavioral information. For example, an ad may include the tex "Sponsored" or 'Close Ad" within its boundaries, either directly or when hovered over. We expect perceptual ad blocking to be less prone to an "arms race."

Over at Freedom to Tinker, Narayanan is quick to point out that this new technology isn't "undefeatable" (as some websites quickly suggested), but it does certainly tilt the ad block battlefield in favor of the end user. He notes that the technology was developed in response to Facebook's decision to integrate ads that look like regular posts in the user's news feed, something systems like AdBlock haven't been able to detect (some smaller blockers like uBlock Origin have been able to, but apparently have such a small market share they've yet to get Facebook's attention).

The other ad blocking obstacle that Narayanan's perceptual ad blocker addresses is the growing numbers of websites that believe they've "solved" the problem by blocking users that block ad blockers. In short, it does this by convincing the web browser to effectively lie to any script trying to determine ad blocker use:

"The second prong of an ad blocking strategy is to deal with websites that try to detect (and in turn block) ad blockers. To do this, we introduce the idea of stealth. The only way that a script on a web page can “see” what’s drawn on the screen is to ask the user’s browser to describe it. But ad blocking extensions can control the browser! Not perfectly, but well enough to get the browser to convincingly lie to the web page script about the very existence of the ad blocker. Our proof-of-concept stealthy ad blocker successfully blocked ads and hid its existence on all 50 websites we looked at that are known to deploy anti-adblocking scripts. Finally, we have also investigated ways to detect and block the ad blocking detection scripts themselves. We found that this is feasible but cumbersome; at any rate, it is unnecessary as long as stealthy ad blocking is successful.

The researchers have developed both a standard and Facebook specific Chrome extension that you can try yourself, and they have no problem with identifying these types of integrated ads:

The researchers have yet to enable the actual blocking component of their ad blockers to, they say, "avoid taking sides on the ethics of ad blocking."

Now you'd like to think that should perceptual ad blocking be as effective as they're claiming, websites and advertisers would be forced to do some soul-searching into why users are flocking to ad blockers in the first place. But most of us know many of these websites won't learn a damn thing in this scenario, and may engage in behavior that forces users to somehow interact with the ads if they want the page to load. Narayanan is quick to point out that this -- like ad block blockers already have -- could only drive users away from these websites even faster:

"If publishers are willing to intrude on users’ attention by making them interact with ads, it does seem unlikely that ad blockers can succeed. But that will also drive away many users, and it’s not clear how many publishers would be willing to make that trade off. Sponsored content / native advertising is again a topic where the law has something to say. These need to be identified clearly as sponsored (and for the most part they are). We’ve found that people aren’t good at noticing these disclosures, but browser extensions can be! Ad blockers could take on the role of prominently alerting readers when a link they’re about to click on is in fact sponsored content."

If perceptual ad blockers are half as successful as the researchers claim they can be, many sites and advertisers have two options. One is to finally take serious stock of why ad block use has skyrocketed (and their own culpability for it) and develop more consumer-centric and creative monetization and advertising efforts. The other is to cry more, double down on blaming visitors for their adaptation failures, design systems that break the internet and annoy site visitors even further, or try to use the law to hamstring the use of ad blockers (an uphill climb, and in some places potentially a two-way street).

If stopping ad blockers truly is a fool's errand (and these researchers strongly believe it is), there's really only one choice that makes any real sense.

from the lalala-we-can't-hear-you dept

Ad blocking and the software that powers it seems to be in the news lately, and for all the wrong reasons. Recently, several prominent sites have attacked ad blockers in several different ways, ranging from lawsuits on the extreme end down to simply withholding content. These attempts are all misguided in the same way, however, in that they attack the software that readers find useful rather than attacking the core problem that makes users turn to ad blockers in the first place: incredibly crappy and occasionally downright dangerous advertising inventory.

One would think that websites and online advertisers would have much to learn from the providers of ad blockers. It seems there is little appetite for education amongst them, however, as we've recently learned that the Interactive Advertising Bureau has flat out barred Adblock Plus from its annual conference.

According to a post on the Adblock Plus blog, the company had bought a ticket for the IAB conference, which takes place in Palm Desert, California at the end of January. The ticket was not cheap: they start at about £1,750 for members, scaling up to £2,600 for non-members. Then, last week, Adblock Plus received an e-mail from the IAB stating: "We are returning your registration fee and cancelling your registration for the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting." That was the entire content of the communication; according to Adblock Plus, there was no reason given for the cancellation.

Adblock Plus employee Mark Addison e-mailed the IAB and asked if "there must be some confusion" as he hadn't asked for a cancellation or refund. All he got was another inscrutable email from the IAB, confirming that his ticket had indeed been cancelled, but offering up no reason for the cancellation.

The reason for the summary refusal to allow Adblock Plus into the conference isn't difficult to surmise, of course. Online advertisers must certainly cast an unfriendly eye towards ad blockers, seeing them as the enemy. And, in online advertising's current iteration, they are. But, as we've stated before, that's because online advertising first made itself an enemy of the public by being annoying, useless, and even a vector for malware. Refusing to let Adblock Plus into the conference equates to online advertisers sticking their fingers in their ears, refusing to listen to what should be a very important voice in the industry.

Adding to how silly this is is the fact that ad blocking is regularly discussed at the conference.

The IAB has previously acknowledged that adblocking is a huge problem for the industry, and the topic of adblocking was discussed at length at last year's annual conference. If a solution is to be found, it will almost certainly require a dialogue between the advertisers and the advertising blockers.

Imagine if, instead of turning a deaf ear towards ad blockers, the IAB instead encouraged a dialogue to find out how to make their advertising more desirable to those using the software. Adblock Plus must have a ton of data that's useful to advertisers, but they won't get it by keeping their little club exclusive.

from the go-simpsons dept

We were just being told by a supposedly respectable media analyst that things like Hulu were anti-American, because it gave away content for "free" and could potentially bring down the entire media business. Yet, it appears that media businesses are learning how to monetize that online content quite well. Bloomberg notes that for shows like The Simpsons and CSI, online ad rates are actually higher than TV ad rates. There are good reasons for this, including the fact that advertisers recognize viewers of shows online are more committed to the shows -- in that they actively chose to seek out and watch that show, as opposed to just having the TV on in the living room while doing something else. Also, people are more willing to watch those ads, in part because they're shorter and they don't have to watch as many to get to the content they want. Now, it is true that the number of viewers still represents a substantial difference and that media companies rely heavily on carriage fees from cable companies and the like. But the idea that ads can't support TV shows online doesn't seem to be based on anything in reality.

from the sledgehammer-on-a-thumbtack dept

Things aren't looking good for the online ad market: reduced spending by advertisers combined with the fact that people don't pay a whole lot of attention to banner ads portends doom and gloom. While the first part of that equation might be out of online publishers' control, they're trying to tackle the second part not by recognizing that advertising needs to be engaging or interesting content in order to be satisfying, but rather by clubbing internet users over the head with some new, huge and intrusive banner ad formats. Say hello to the Fixed Panel, which is a huge vertical banner that "scrolls to the top and bottom of the page as a user scrolls", the XXL Box, which is pretty much exactly what it says, and the Pushdown, the biggest of the bunch, which rolls down from the top of the page to get right in the user's face. The trade group behind these new formats says they are "designed to help stimulate a renaissance of creative advertising on the Internet that meets the needs of marketers by better integrating their messages into the fabric of the Web." That sounds like a lot of buzzwords, but conspicuous by its absence is any mention of the user's experience of these ads. These ads might grab users' attention through brute force, but will the experience be a positive one? It seems likely that intrusive advertising that gets in users' way will simply make the current situation worse by driving users away from the content. This is a further reflection of just how dead the captive advertising model is. Consumers have plenty of choices about where to get their content online; if a publishers' advertising keeps getting in their way, they'll move on and get content from somewhere else.

from the it's-a-little-late-for-this-epiphany dept

With the Christian Science Monitor going online only, many newspapers are again re-evaluating their online strategies. When you listen to newspaper execs, you usually hear the same line over and over again: even though online page views are up and paper sales are down, the amount of ad revenue coming from online is still tiny compared to print. That's definitely true, but a large part of the problem is that many newspapers don't really concentrate on online sales -- especially among the best targets: local businesses. Many small businesses advertise online, but because newspapers don't court them, they go elsewhere, such as directly to Google.

The NY Times is writing about how at least some newspapers are realizing that, rather than focusing their sales efforts almost entirely on print ads, they need to start focusing on selling online ads as well. Amazingly, many of these newspapers have almost all of their sales commissions for print ads. In those cases, is it any wonder that they don't get more online ads? In fact, many ad sales folks simply "throw in" some online ads as a bonus to get companies to sign the dotted line for print ads, which is exactly the wrong incentive needed if you're trying to grow the online ad business.

What's really amazing is that newspapers are just now catching on to this. They're only about five years too late. The local businesses, which would have been interested five years ago, have figured out that there are other options for online advertising from Google to "local" sites like Yelp and CitySearch.